Sig Christenson: Ghosts of Bagram

Every now and then you hear about Bagram Airfield or see a story in the paper with the dateline. It just might have an exotic ring to the name, and it’s got a great view — tall, snow-capped mountains you can see in the distance on a nice, clear winter day.

Don’t come here, though, expecting the exotic. More than one soldier here, or in some other theater or war, will be heard saying “embrace the suck” for very good reason.

Bagram is a gritty place, a base where people work for months, and in some cases, more than a year at a time. It was home to the Soviets during their long, futile occupation of Afghanistan, and some of the vintage Russian era still stands.

But it’s more than just old buildings. There are ghosts here, or at least ghost stories.

Edward Ornelas/Express News

An Afghan girl tries earn money selling candy to motorists in Kabul.

One day we walked along a sidewalk next to “Disney Boulevard,” an occasionally bumpy two-way street, and saw an ugly old hangar next to the relatively new Air Force theater hospital. That, of course, is Afghanistan. It is a country of contrasts — beautiful children working busy, hazy streets in Kabul on the lookout for Americans who might give them a dollar in exchange for candy, bubble gum, books and maps, or just begging for money.

It is a place where prominent politicians like Fawzia Koofi sit on plush furniture while miles away children as young as 6 and 7 walk twisting dirt roads doing the day’s family chores.

But that old building was something worse, something right out of a Halloween haunted house. A friend who has been on base for awhile said the story on the hangar is that the Taliban hanged the dependents of Russian troops there at the end of the war — women and children among them.

I asked some Army public affairs folks about that, but they don’t know if the story is true.

A reasonable man seeing the vestiges of Moscow’s disastrous intervention here might well ask if America’s time here isn’t a repeat of a sorry story. Back in the day, we liked to say that Afghanistan would be Russia’s Vietnam.

So, what is it to us?

That seems a fair question, but no one is bothering to answer that now. There is a war going on, and this place, some 25 miles and 90 minutes from Kabul, is a hub for it. We have a lot of aircraft activity at Bagram, ranging from F-16 jets roaring down the runway at all hours to helicopters taking soldiers and civilian workers to bases elsewhere in the country.

Bagram bustles. It’s full of soldiers from various nations, a good number of the 22,000 here from the United States, France, Poland and Egypt.

We share dust- and smog-filled sidewalks as heavy trucks and aging SUVs slowly roll down Disney, the civilian workers, soldiers, airmen and the occasional journalist all making their way somewhere. As I look at their faces, I am struck by something.

The American enlistees salute officers as they cross paths. You see that at home. But easy smiles and laughter aren’t often observed among many we pass.

That might be because this place, in some ways, is like a prison. Most people, I would suspect, spend every waking and sleeping hour inside the wire, going about their jobs as they were sent here to do by their governments or companies.

They establish routines. Some run in the morning. Others line up at the Green Beans coffee shop, or buy a pizza, step outside the food court to have a smoke or trek to a dining hall to eat food that — to be truthful — is loaded with sodium and not that good.

Days can melt into months and feel the way the weather so often looks this time of year: cloudy, cold and rainy, the promise of spring out there but as distant as Pluto.

Still, there is local charm on Planet Bagram. As expert observers, we can report that with certainty.

It’s the French. Some people might question the France’s willingness to fight, but their troops are the most stylish on the base. We’ve seen a good many French military women wearing large berets that could double as chefs’ hats.

You can almost taste the crème brûlée on a cool spring evening along the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe a short walk down the brightly lit thoroughfare that to my mind is the soul of Paris, a road truly more a boulevard than Bagram’s Disney.

That’s a plus in a world that, so far in our stay here, so often has been slate-gray.